Good article – you captured the essence of the Social Media News Release. The traditional release still has its place, especially for corporate information within the regulatory framework. There are exciting possibilities for communicators to use this platform for communicating and sharing the various elements of the story in both traditional and new media. As mentioned, it becomes a network of information, giving the story some extra depth and colour.

Thanks for commenting. It’s unfortunate, and woefully unsurprising, that you’ve already been encountering lots of Spam Wolves in Social Media Sheeps’ clothing.

I am disappointed, though, that the majority of what you’ve seen has been the same old hyperbole or incompetent uselessness. Honestly, I would have thought that most of those aware of and trying out social media releases would also be striving for better content, and would be savvy enough to not insert dead links.

Regardless, I’m very glad to have you, and other journalists providing honest feedback on the social media release. Without it, we can’t hope to tweak it to work better, drop it altogether, or do whatever else that should be done because it’s what is best for the audience.

At its essence, I think the problem with press releases is the inability of organizations (or sometimes individuals) to relinquish the “command and control” communications style. The rigid physical format of the faxed release is like a symbol and/or symptom of that thinking.

The good communicators have always been into establishing a two-way dialogue because they realized the value. Now anyone who’s worth their salt at least needs to catch up due to social media forcing the issue.

You pose some excellent questions here.

I think that a glaring omission in my original post is that social media press releases, according to some, should be sent in addition to standard releases–like sending you an assembled puzzle instead of a picture, so you can take the pieces you want and leave the rest, while still getting the context. Again, the point is to make it easier for journalists and bloggers. Leaving them with a pile of random facts and links without an overarching explanation probably isn’t a good way of going about it.

As for the distribution, I know that Canadian News Wire offers a social media press release service, although I can’t recall the highlights of how this differs from their regular media release distribution.

This brings up the larger question, though, about how PR professionals reach out to journalists, bloggers and other media in the first place. From my perspective I see the good ones calling on us to either know and/or research the work of anyone we’re pitching to as the basic first step. At the same time, I know that a lot of (most?) “PR” folks blast out as many releases as possible, not even looking where they’re going, and hoping like hell someone picks up the story.

Thus you get inundated with an unusable gush of information.

We’re stuck using a press-release format that was designed for fax machines. If we blew the whole thing up and started over, we would NEVER develop the sort of releases we do now. We’d speak like human beings, and we’d allow people to talk back to us. We’d acknowledge our mistakes and link to others in our industry who have inspired us.

I’m also not sure about the template you linked to. In that form it seems really busy and hard to follow. Suggesting bullet points for facts doesn’t really work without context or explanation. Having a “white paper” linked to the release won’t fly either as if the editor/reporter/blogger doesn’t get the story from the release, they’ll never click through for more info.

As an editor I love your exhortation to cut the buzzwords self-serving blather as much as possible. When I see a release full of blah-blah-blah, unless I know it’s important from the get go, I bin it. … Read more

Overall, a good evolution of something that is done by thousands of people each day and done well by dozens.